


A Bit To Share

by Silvermoonphantom



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Body Modification, Character Death, Culture, Gen, Jedi Can Form Attachments (Star Wars), To food, tattooine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:53:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28447206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvermoonphantom/pseuds/Silvermoonphantom
Summary: A collection of one-shots featuring Anakin.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 49





	1. Tattooine Cuisine

The history of cultures - of immigration - of ancestors and new beginnings - is all catalogued in the bright flavors and styles of street food. If you want to know about a city’s past, look at what is being served on corners. Look where long lines are forming, where people are clustered against walls and sitting on curbs, happy to sacrifice comfort for the pleasure of eating good food.

You will find the ingredients, the cooking methods, the styles of preparation, the memory of home-cooking that can be traced back generations and across continents, preserved in portable stoves and hand-blended spices.

On Tatooine, slaves made due with their rations, scrounging what credits they could for a bite off the best tasting pop-up stall that would sell to them. One in particular, under the bright purple banner of a cactus flower, sold portions to slaves at half-price. 

The desert provided meat, while shaded gorges offered sweet and succulent zucca fruits, black seeds that crumbled like sand, and more types of spices than he could name. 

The sharp chemicals their few native plants produced - the locals loved the flavor, loved the _bite_ of it compared to bland nutrient rations. Water was precious, but plants could be grown in closed systems - nothing lost to evaporation. You just needed a tight seal, the credits to AFFORD enough water to start the project, and a way to keep it shaded from the double-sun noon that could scorch the skin on your ear tips right down to the cartilage. Hot peppers grown directly under those suns could do the same to a person’s tongue.  
Mushrooms grown in the hidden alcoves around the moisture farming machines could keep a man’s hopes up just by the waiting of it to ripen. 

Unleavened bread, tasting of smoke and bearing a fine grit from being cooked in the sand. 

Potent yogurts, occasionally sweet buttermilk left over from churning.   
  


All the foods grown from the sand and dust and defiant will to live tucked in the corners of this desert planet. Those hardy, often tough and painfully spicy plants, were cheaper than the plants grown from hydroponics stations.   
less water spent. Less energy. Just the unforgiving sun and what little humidity the planet still secreted away for hidden roots and stubborn, growing things. 

Anakin remembered the feeling of his mother tucking him against her leg, the tart, silky cream of yogurt blending into the burning hot sauce, scooped up by carefully unfolded halves of flat bread. The memory of sharing a slow-roasted Kenerith cactus flower - taking turns picking away the thorny outer petals to reveal the sweetly savory heart, and the soft flesh clinging to the base of inner petals. 

He could almost feel it under his fingernails.

Small moments of joy, shared through food.

Anakin took a breath through his nose, closed his eyes as he swallowed. He could almost feel the sun on the back of his neck through the potent memories flooding out from the tastes and smells on his plate. 

Beside him, Obi-Wan gave him a mild look of concern. Probably sensing the flair of emotion burbling through the Force. 

Anakin’s voice was carefully level - carefully polite as he asked the governor across from them. 

“Do you regularly serve this style of cuisine at your table? It’s from a desert world, right?” Outside, the lush jungle of this world sounded like static from the misting rain drifting over waxy leaves. 

The man looked surprised, then pleased. 

“Only recently!” He said. “We hired a new chef, and she’s been sharing some recipes from her homeworld. I’ve had many of the spices imported for her, but the flavors are worth the effort.” 

He smiled sweetly at the man. 

“Could I have a moment to speak to her? There’s a flavor I haven’t tasted in years - I want to see if she’ll share it.” 

The governor waved, amused. “Go right ahead, though I wouldn’t count on it. She’s pricklier than a pinkaburr about her recipes.” 

Anakin excused himself, asked around, found the kitchen. 

There were several chefs moving about, but one of them caught his eye. She used a massive, dented pan-pot, something that looked like it’d been hammered from ship scrap. She flicked it constantly on the open flame, sensing cascades of finely diced meat and hot pepper slivers up and back into itself.

He leaned against the doorway and watched her for a bit. Soaked in the smells. Ignored the prickling combination of _grief_ and _longing_ and _satisfaction-home_ that lingered in the air. 

Eventually, she sensed she was being watched, and shot him a suspicious look.

“Only thing missing is the _Kenerith,_ huh?”

The woman’s eyebrows shot up. 

She flicked the heat down, transferred the contents of her pot-pan to a covered bowl, and turned to him. 

“You’ve been to Tattooine?” She asked. 

He nodded, his smile wry. 

“Grew up there. Used to frequent a place that made sauce just like what you served today.” 

She scoffed, and turned back to the stove. 

“No one makes sauce like this.” She pulled something white out of a sealed shelf above her head, and smeared it with her fingertips across a flat-top stove hot enough to hiss at the contact. She didn’t flinch at the heat.

Anakin wondered if that was his dismissal, until she turned to him and barked “Are you watching for new dunes over there? Come in!” 

She waved him over, and he obeyed. 

Before he could complain, she’d already dumped a small bowl in his hands. She ladled some sauce from between the meaty chunks in a pot that Anakin could probably sit fully inside.

With her bare fingers, she plucked the puffed-up bread from off the stovetop to flip it over. 

A moment longer, and she nipped the finished bread up, stuffing it in the margins of the sauce. With a little flourish, a plop of creamy white was scraped onto the edge. 

“Well? Go on.” She waved a hand, and he backpedaled to the doorway to let the cooks rush about without avoiding him. 

He wasn’t sure why he’d just been handed more food. The smells were familiar, but the beautiful white bowl felt out of place, jarring against his memory. 

He pulled some sopping bread out, up to his mouth, and had to fight to keep tears from gathering in his eyes. 

It was exactly the same. 

“Kenerith is a shit plant.” He could hear her grumble from the kitchen. “It takes hours of roasting to become edible, and it looks like an ashy, blackened burr of thorns by the end of it. Only slaves ever bought something that sat in the coals all day, looking like that.”

She flung something at him from across the room, and he almost missed catching it. 

He turned the packet in his palm, and found a packet of dried peppers, a familiar, _biting_ smell already oozing through the mesh. 

“Congratulations.” She said. “I’m glad I met you here.” 

Congratulations on becoming a free man, she said without saying. 

Congratulations for still finding joy from the memories you had of that place.

That we met again, and we’re both in a better place.

  
Anakin curled his fingers around the peppers, tucked them into a pocket to enjoy later.

He didn’t say thanks, just ate the food he’d been given. 

Carefully cleaned the bowl until not a speck was left. To leave food waste was an insult that ran deeper than he could bear to give.

Washed it himself, so the cooks could make food and the next person in line wouldn’t need to wait for clean flatwear. 

“Until next time.” His mouth said, in an old memory. 

“Until then.” She agreed. 

They would meet, make a bond, and part again. Like the spinning shadows cast by two suns, crossing on another world. 

A bond created over providing food 

and the heartfelt joy of eating it. 


	2. Snips

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Did anyone ever mention that humans are incredibly fragile creatures?

When Anakin was 7 years old, before he ever met Obi-Wan, he never had really formed any serious thought of escaping. Still a child, there was simply  _ what was _ . 

This was the situation he lived, and that’s all he knew as an option. 

But his mother encouraged him to build. To imagine. To consider and pick ideas apart in his mind. To see the patterns. 

So, Anakin Skywalker was 7 years old when he saw someone die for the first time. 

He’d heard of death, knew people around him had died, but this was the first time he’d seen it. 

The man had been a slave-owner, greed shining in the fine metals he wore and shining silk around his shoulder. 

Anakin had been idly listening to the man shout at someone, tending Watto’s shop. He saw the moment the man stepped backward, heel catching on one of his trailing hems. 

The man twisted to catch himself, but still landed with a crunch that Anakin flinched at without really knowing why. He didn’t move after that.

Anakin asked his mother later, why he had died if he’d just fallen. Shmi Skywalker explained that necks were very delicate and important, so if their neck was damaged, they could die from it. Anakin considered that, and asked why. 

His mother compared it to C3P0, the droid thickly layered with wires. She trailed her calloused hands over the colorful weave, and explained that humans also had wires in them, that controlled all the signals in their body. Anakin lit up with understanding. 

All of these wires started in the brain, and branched down through the neck, then through all the different areas of their body. So, if the wires get cut…

Anakin nodded. 

Then, the spine protected their main wiring. That made sense.

7-year-old Anakin Skywalker made a mental note to get the still-developing C3P0 into a protective shell soon. 

—

  
  


8-year-old Anakin tried to boot C3P0 one morning and found the entire droid would not wake up. He checked the programming, the chips, the hydrolic motors and power cyclers. 

After days of digging around, he found the problem. 

A single wire at the base of the bot’s head had wiggled loose - broken free of a rushed soldering job. 

Anakin considered the bare wire, cradling a humanoid head in his lap. 

Soldered it back into place later that night. 

—

When Anakin is 19, he abruptly remembers his old wondering about nerves and wiring when an unlucky strike bites off his hand. The searing pain creates a feedback loop of agony, and he wonders if this is how Artoo feels when enduring a taser. If pain is like wild electricity overloading the wires in his body. 

And then he receives a prosthetic, sensors tapping into wires. He gets pressure back, if not temperature or texture.

He spends a lot of nights exploring the places where metal met flesh, and wiring burrowed in to join with nerves. Tendons tight and tiny hydrolics hissing so quietly that he could only hear them breathe in the dead of night when all other noises were muffled by moonlight and humming air filtration.   


A long time flexing, feeling the technology that became an extension of him.

Nerves and wires. 

Metal and skin. 

Currents. 

And then he was Darth Vader, and the metal grew around him in a tangled, writhing cage. Into his chest and lungs. Into his seared muscle. A droid with a human heartbeat and artificial breath. 

He was uncomfortably aware of how much his existence depended on technology that he didn’t have the dexterity to maintain on his own. Dependent. Helpless. 

Wires and nerves and currents. 

There came a moment, when Vader realized he wanted to kill his master. When the comfortable hierarchy of master and apprentice became a mantle too heavy to bear.

A moment of self-reflection. 

Of cold, calculating curiosity. 

And a memory of a droid’s head across his lap, tiny fingers plucking curiously at a single, fatal wire. 

We’re all just wires. Him most of all.

Their bond led to Palpatine’s mind. The shields were too strong to attack, and it would be foolish to try. 

But “the mind” was set in the brain, wasn’t it? Traditional teachings defended the head at all costs. 

A few fingers lower than that, was…. 

—

Vader’s artificial breath didn’t hitch, but his mask did tilt in a way that the other officers interpreted as surprise. 

Darth Sideous, halfway through a speech on the glory of the empire - had abruptly slumped over and toppled out of his throne. 

His head cracked sickly against the metal floor, limbs ragdolling.

The Force could lift entire ships, could crush and rend durasteel. Vader often lifted men bodily by the neck. He knew it was vulnerable. 

Near the base of Darth Sideous’s skull, between the padded gaps of cartilage, a bundle of nerves only 0.30 inches in diameter had been severed. 

And the Sith Master was dead. 

Wires and currents. 

a quick snip

And it all

Stops

**Author's Note:**

> Special interest? What special interest? I don’t have any of those!  
> *libraries of recipes, documentaries, dietary notes on cultures around the world spill from my pockets
> 
> Idk what those are, don’t worry about it.


End file.
